Why not just investigate and use a little imagination? I personally think that the attitudes of the scientific community as displayed on this board are responsible for the retarded growth of scientific knowledge in the last 50 years. I know you will protest that there has been a great increase in knowledge. True, but I believe it could have been even greater without the current shackles placed upon it by the intellectual inquisition that is typified by the members on this board.

I think you're missing the point here. Anyone can come up with a sponge on a stick model and make claims for it. So how would you have science proceed? How should science investigate this? What predictions does it make?

It turns out that the type of investigation into these claims has already been done and it refutes the claims. The door was closed to these claims long ago. Do we repeat the investigation? We'll just get the same answer. Is there something new about this model that would change how the investigation should be carried out? Nope. Does this model ignore certain absolute observations and require them never to have happened? Yes.

Look at the claim about mass-energy equivalence being rubbish. If this claim was correct, Hiroshima never happened. Yet we know categorically that it did happen. Should science really have to investigate this claim all the way back to Einstein, or can we say that the claim is fatuous because an observed event shows it to be nonsense? Where would science be now if it had to chase down every claim made, for example those claims which require gravity and its effects to be non-existent or ignored?

The attitudes displayed on this board by scientists are directly related to the attitudes encountered. For example, if someone comes along, makes a whole bunch of unfounded assertions based on ignorance of the subject then declares their opinion to be just as, if not more, valuable than the opinions of specialists in the field and arrogantly igonres all attempts to assist what do you think the response is going to be? In this particular thread the insinuation is that Einstein, Hawking etc were/are so thick that they didn't notice a sponge on a stick!! Read back through the thread, keeping all this in mind and you'll see what I mean.

In the nebular theory, accretion refers to the collision and sticking of cooled microscopic dust and ice particles *electrostatically*, in protoplanetary discs and Gas giant protoplanet systems, eventually leading to planetesimals which gravitationally accrete more small particles and other planetesimals. [emphasis mine]

The astronauts were conducting a simple demonstration of the already known effect of electrostatics. Love's comment about solving the middle stage of planetary accretion was just humorous hyperbole.

While other hot, jupiter-like planets are known to orbit nearby stars, the "crowded" multiple star nature of this system challenges current theories of planet formation.

This is from a caption on an artist's conception. There's no detail, no way to determine what the caption's author was referring to, and it's not a technical article. As far as I can tell, current theories of planet formation are for a single star. The physics in multi-star systems is extremely complex.

When we peer out into the universe we can observe accretion disks in various stages and situations.

By the way, if a star were to somehow eject a planetary-sized body at less than escape velocity, that body's orbit would intersect the star at the conclusion of the first orbit.

On the other hand, in attepts to explain my theory, I researched to see if exoplanets have been found in exteme proximity to thier host star. Assuming planets come from their host star, I would expect to find planets closer and closer to their host star and eventually find planets in contact with thier host star in the process of being ejected. This is what I have found.

The planets have also broken another record: at distances of only 897,000 km and 1,137,000 km, they are closer to their star than any other exoplanet ever observed.

From that article:

quote:{A team} has discovered the ruins of a planetary system, consisting of the cores of two former giant planets stripped of their gaseous envelopes, orbiting around the remnants of the core of a red giant. These two exoplanets are the smallest, hottest and closest to their parent star ever discovered. This finding, published in the 22 December 2011 issue of the journal Nature could shed new light on the fate of planetary systems.

Accretion theory and planetary formation are about the beginning of a planet's life, the article you linked to is about the end of those planet's lives

How do we ever really come to any vastly new understanding if we limit ourselves to only those things that are not unusual?

This thread isn't about a merely unusual idea, but an unverified and probably falsified idea (its difficult to tell, since it has not be described sufficiently to quantify anything). Calling the ideas about magnetism unusual was probably a diplomatic way of saying just that by whoever edited the wikipedia page.

Why not just investigate and use a little imagination?

Scientists do!

I personally think that the attitudes of the scientific community as displayed on this board are responsible for the retarded growth of scientific knowledge in the last 50 years.

If those, and many others among them, are the products of a society labouring under the retarded growth in scientific knowledge I say 'viva retardation!'.

Unless this was just a subtle complaint that its 2012 and we still don't have flying cars and houses on the moon....then I'm right with you.

I know you will protest that there has been a great increase in knowledge. True, but I believe it could have been even greater without the current shackles placed upon it by the intellectual inquisition that is typified by the members on this board.

There was a time in human history when human reasoning did not work under those shackles. It was from about 150,000 BCE till about the 18th Century (with a few small, elite, exceptions). If you want to compare that 152,000 year period with the last 200 years to compare the systems for how good they are at advancing scientific knowledge you are welcome to do so.

Once you remove the shackles you get 'MMR causes autism', 'the moon landing was a hoax', 'Venus is the ejecta from Jupiter and caused disasters on earth in ancient times', 'TimeCube', or 'Zeus rewards sacrifices' and other assorted crankery.

Those shackles on human knowledge were willingly donned. So as to avoid the siren call and go crashing into the rocks of nonsense. They avoid us taking off on flights of fantasy that are so appealing to our primate brains.

You should be able to see from Feynman's description of science what mistake is being made by JT in this thread. He is steadfastly refusing to 'compute the consequences...to see what it would imply' and he absolutely has not 'compared the computation result with nature'.

These aren't really optional steps.

The advantage to this 'intellectual inquisition' is that we know that whatever ideas survive it are probably right - or at least they are on to something important. Of course, some right ideas may never see the light of day or be dismissed as soon as they are proposed. But out of the billions of humans, if none of them feel motivated to investigate the idea further - then we can hardly blame science. There are a finite number of things we can investigate, budgets are not limitless and nor is time. Any idea that fails to gain the attention of scientists and those that fund them, is going to go uninvestigated.

Of course, if you are really suggesting that we should investigate more fringe ideas, then what you are saying is that there should be more funding for scientists, and along with good science education so as to ensure there are enough scientists to do the extra research. I'm fine with that proposal too. I'm sure you can double the budget on such things while only taking a barely noticeable scratch from the military budget (if we are talking about the US),

How do we ever really come to any vastly new understanding if we limit ourselves to only those things that are not unusual? Why not just investigate ...

Well, this is the investigation. What you later in your post describe as an "intellectual inquisition" is precisely the investigation. How else would you suggest that we should "investigate" an idea?

I personally think that the attitudes of the scientific community as displayed on this board are responsible for the retarded growth of scientific knowledge in the last 50 years. I know you will protest that there has been a great increase in knowledge. True, but I believe it could have been even greater without the current shackles placed upon it by the intellectual inquisition that is typified by the members on this board.

It is true that without the "intellectual inquisition" we would have accepted new and important truths faster than has been the case. But we would also have accepted a whole lot of complete bullshit as if it was important truths, and we wouldn't know which was which. And that would not be scientific progress.

Without the "inquisition", if you caught bubonic plague we wouldn't know whether to give you antibiotics or to denounce Evil Western Medicine and offer you crystal healing instead.

Yes, we put "shackles" on new ideas. The ideas that are strong burst out of those shackles. That's the test of an idea.

And you will note that the very craziest-sounding ideas have in fact gained credence as a result of this process. Relativity, quantum theory, the non-conservation of parity --- these are the craziest ideas I can think of. In fact, I will admit that they are so crazy that I myself would never have thought of them. But someone did, and they have been incorporated into science --- because they withstood the "inquisition".

quote:While other hot, jupiter-like planets are known to orbit nearby stars, the "crowded" multiple star nature of this system challenges current theories of planet formation.

I don't see anything particularly wrong with this statement. Most of the foreign solar systems we've encountered don't see to be much like ours as far as the arrangement of planet masses, orbital distances, and planet types are concerned. Some of the ideas that are used to explain where the rock planets and gas giants are in our system are challenged when we find gas giants close to their suns.

But sometimes challenged merely means that the very simplest approximate models aren't good enough. Not every challenge or difficulty means that a hypothesis is wrong.

By the way, if a star were to somehow eject a planetary-sized body at less than escape velocity, that body's orbit would intersect the star at the conclusion of the first orbit.

Exactly so. Even assuming some magnetic propulsion exerted by the sun on the newly spit out planet, planet must have a highly eccentric orbit that brings it extremely close to the sun. Maybe JT will respond to that issue when you present it.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)

The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead. William Lloyd Garrison

There are significant scientific problems with attempts to explain the formation of stars and planets from clouds of gas and dust.6 , 7 One main issue is that the hypothetical disk of gas and dust tends to dissipate too fast for the resulting planets to become as large as they are observed to be.

dradequate writes:

Oooh, if only they had any evidence for this.

Howling about evidence is a conversation stopper, and it never stops to think if the claim could possibly be true. Why don't you make a counter claim like the following: The accretionary disk is very likely to produce planets because the force of gravity acting on the dust and gas is stronger than the forces that cause dispersal in gases and small particles of dust? Afraid to stick your neck out?

In a science forum, if asking for evidence is a conversation stopper, then the conversation was pointless.

People can come up with all kinds of ideas, but if they have no evidence to support them, there's no reason for anyone else to give them any credence. For every unevidenced idea out there, there is an equally unevidenced, but opposite claim or idea. How do you choose between them?

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they'd be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: "To physics and metaphysics." Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy -- truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

I think that giraffes exist. If you started "howling about evidence" then I could cite you eyewitness accounts, I could show you photographs, I could show you videos, and if all else failed I could buy you a ticket to the zoo. You could "howl about evidence" and I could stop your howling by showing you evidence. It wouldn't be a "conversation stopper", it would be a conversation starter. Because I'm right, giraffes do exist.

Asking for evidence is only a conversation stopper to people who don't have any evidence.

Why don't you make a counter claim ...

I have. With links to actual scientific papers rather than the unevidenced maunderings of cranks.

But that's actually by-the-by. In order to reject an idea that has no evidence for it, there is no obligation on me to produce a counter claim. If Fred Bloggs is accused of murder, then it is sufficient for me to show that there is no evidence connecting him to the murder and that at the time of the crime he was on another continent as verified by two hundred eyewitnesses. That shoots down that hypothesis. I don't also need to produce a "counter claim" where I prove who did commit the murder.

You're interested in geology, aren't you? Well, back a few centuries ago, some guy (whose name I could look up if you want) suggested that geological observations could be explained by the Earth's gravity being turned off for a bit and then turned back on. Now, would I really need to develop a theory of geology that actually worked in order to point out the problems with this hypothesis and reject it? If so, then people should have believed that hypothesis until the development of real geology. Do you think that they should have done so?